Page 29 of The Duke’s Masked Wallflower

He was so decent, it hurt her. He would make a good husband, if he didn’t hate her by the end of all this trouble. And yet, she could see the uncertainty in his eyes—the duty he carried with him always. She was not mistaken about that. He did not love her yet and would abandon her if another woman came along. Maybe that would be for the best. No. She needed him. Or else... It was not worth thinking about tonight.

“I know I can,” she said. “And I am grateful for it more than I can properly say, and grateful too that you are as gentle and kind as you are, Mr. Sinclair.”

He smiled a little sadly. “Then let us go to dinner,” he said.

They walked back toward the drawing room together. Rosalie was aware that, beyond the door, her father was likely deep in conversation with the Duke of Hartmere. And whatever was said between them tonight would set something in motion she no longer had the power to stop.

But she had not thought, until this very moment on Mr. Sinclair’s arm, how many people she might have to deceive to get what came naturally to most women—a life of her own.

Ten

It was true: Gabriel had expected his aunt to be pleased by the garden party and the many recent developments of late. But he had not expected her to look like a young woman again, or a bird flitting from nest to nest with a beak full of praise for her nephew. Before that, she had come to him in the morning.

“The roses will not be ready, of course. It’s only March still. But they look so despondent out there,” Elisabeth said, sweeping into the breakfast room already dressed for the party. There was a stack of correspondence clutched to her chest. “Morland tells me the beds are a full fortnight behind where they ought to be, but the weather is turning now. Such a shame, mais tant pis. We shall make more of the lawn games and not take the guests walking. Oh! I have written to Mrs. Aines about her string quartet, the one that played at the Herberts’ last summer. Do you remember them, Gabriel?”

Gabriel set down his book and picked up his coffee. “I remember the cellist weeping. I do not remember why.”

“I think it was part of the performance.” She set her letters down so hard it made him flinch, and began sorting them. “I have not hosted a garden party in three years. Do you know that? Three years. I had forgotten how much I enjoy planning these things.”

Gabriel looked up from the cover of the French travelogue he had been reading. “You need not have waited three years on my account.”

“I did not wait on your account. I waited because I did not want to host, and then I found quite suddenly that I did. Curious...” She glanced at him, something knowing in the look. “It truly is remarkable what a person can want again once they have decided to let themselves, no?”

He said nothing to that and let her return to her letters, and he returned himself to the travelogue, though he had read the same paragraph about Nice four times now without absorbing a word.

France, he thought. But maybe not Nice, where I went on my Grand Tour. Maybe somewhere new for her and me, but with better weather and less society.

That was the arithmetic of this plan with Miss Winthrop—who he had begun to think of as Rosalie. What was the point in entertaining propriety in his own mind when they were headed to social hell arm in arm?

The courtship would end eventually, exactly as he had promised Rosalie it would. Rosalie would retreat quietly to Sinclair. He would be a rejected suitor, mildly embarrassed but easily consoled. Elisabeth, who was coming alive again as he hoped, would learn that the wedding she had been so quietly hoping for was never coming after all—but with hope restored that it one day might. And Rosalie would⁠—

“What did you say?” Elisabeth asked in French.

When Gabriel looked up, she was staring at him.

“What?” he asked.

“You said, Rosalie.” She smiled, putting a hand on her hip.

“I did not.” Or did he? “I said roses,” he bluffed. “What a shame they will not be ready for us.”

His aunt made a disbelieving sound and did not press him further. He was grateful for this because, at that moment, the footman entered with his morning letters. There were the usual letters: invitations, his solicitor writing, his cousin, God help him. But beneath all of it, in James’s familiar hand, there was a thick white card. He knew what it would be and opened it anyway.

James Edgeworth, Marquess of Beaumont requests the honor of your presence at his marriage to Miss Tiffany Warwick on⁠—

And so on and so forth with more details.

Gabriel set the card down on the table with more care than it required, his hand suddenly tensing. He could feel Elisabeth’s attention drifting to him. She would ask if he was happy for James. He would say yes. That was not in question. He had known Tiffany’s worth from the start and would say as much to anyone else who asked for his opinion.

But the date on the card struck him as too close and real. Fixed and coming. Unavoidable? Concrete. You are happy for him, Gabriel told himself, rising to the drinks’ cabinet before he really knew what he was doing. You are only unsettled because you are not expecting to enjoy the day ahead.

He excused himself. Elisabeth did not follow. In the nearby drawing room, he carried himself and the glass to the mantel, where his father and Marcus looked down at him from their portrait.

It had been painted when Gabriel had been four years old, too young to stand on his own two feet and therefore be included. His father’s wide hand rested on his brother’s shoulder—the suggestion of a line of succession settled and untroubled, a future that had seemed at the time concrete.

Gabriel was a little too deep in his cups by the time the garden party was properly underway, though not so far gone that anyone would have remarked on it. It was a state he had perfected over the last decade, pleasantly softened inside while the outward measure of him remained sharp.

“You look so deep in thought I’m concerned,” James said, appearing at his arm with two glasses of lemonade he had clearly fetched under duress. He wore a cream jacket that reminded Gabriel of the invitation.